JOY ALONG THE WAY: THE GULAG COOKBOOK

In rearranging my upstairs book shelves, I pulled out a book that looked as new as if it had come directly from a bookstore. Two inches thick it was, with midnight black cover and gold lettering that said, "Aieksandr I Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Harper & Row."

I held it in my hands, waiting for my mind to catch up on how I came by it. I never bought the book. It had no library imprint. There was a mysterious inked notation on the front end paper. It said, "Rice Puddings." Across the page from that notation was, "Page Preface."

I turned to such page and found only that Solzhenitsvn was paying tribute to those who had helped him with material for the book. Nothing at all about Rice Puddings.

I concluded that I must have bought this book during the era of the Big Flea Market, but I had never read it.

Better late than never, I thought, and started reading. I waded through such hard-to-pronounce names as Skripnikova, Levitskaya, Yekaterinodor, Gaypayooshink and many others. Such names slow my reading substantially.

Suddenly, on page 9 I came across a recipe clipped from newsprint and pasted right over where Solzhenitsyn is describing the ease with which arrests were made at this time in Russian history and the horror that accompained such arrests including banishment to the Gulag Archipelago. The recipe was for Quick Apple Bread. The juxtoposition of that innocent recipe pasted over such a grim occurance in history made me chuckle, then grow sadly sober, than chuckle again. I let the recipe stay intact and thus missed some of Solzhenitsyn's words.

I began to realize that the first, second or maybe even third reader of the book had found the reading, especially all those names so difficult to pronounce that she (I can't seem to say she/he in view of the recipes) had decided to make a recipe book of it. I could relate.

I hurriedly glanced through the rest of the book and found pasted-in recipes for a broccoli-cauliflower salad, a Back To Eden Baked Apple Dessert, etc.

The entrepreneur recipe book editor quickly gave up the project, for there are 660 pages in the book and only a few recipes. Did she think it a travesty to cover up such history or realize that if the book became filled, it would increase its bulk to where it would never shut? Or did she just want to contribute to the flea market?

Let me quote two things, one from the serious Solzhenitsyn, one from the cookbook attempt: "I could have replied to him (the fellow prisoner with which Solzhenitsyn had had a confrontation about the existence of God), but prison had already undermined my certainty, and the principal thing was that some kind of clean, pure feeling does live within us, existing apart rom all our convictions, and right then it dawned upon me that I had not spoken out of conviction but because the idea had been implanted in me from outside, and I merely asked him, 'Do you believe in God?' 'Of course,' he answered tranquilly."

That is about as near as Solzhenitsyn came, in the book, to state his faith, but a clean, pure feeling within, despite brain-washed convictions, be they right or wrong, isn't bad.

As for the apple bread recipe, I quote thus: 1/2 cup shortening, 1 cup sugar, 2 eggs, 1 cup chopped apples, 1 1/2 tablespoon of buttermilk, 1 teaspoon vanilla, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon each of baking soda and baking powder, 2 cups flour, 1 cup chopped nuts. 350 oven for 50 or 60 minutes in a bread loaf pan. Cooks will know how to put it together. This is good, but that Back-to-Eden recipe arouses my curiosity. May try it some day, since the apple season is soon upon us.

Never did find the Rice Pudding recipe or recipes.

REJOICE!

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime columnist for the Southeast Missourian.